China Dialogue is the world’s first fully bilingual website devoted to the environment. Our mission is to promote direct dialogue and the search for solutions to our shared environmental challenges. China Dialogue is an independent, non-profit organisation based in London, Beijing and San Francisco.

China is growing fast and, as it grows, it is faced with urgent environmental challenges. Environmental costs may account for 10 per cent of China’s GDP and the effects of pollution, desertification and climate change are already beginning to be felt within China and outside her borders. Climate change, species loss, pollution, water scarcity and environment damage are not problems confined to one country: they are challenges that concern all the world’s citizens, but the rise of China gives them a new urgency. Tackling these challenges will require a common effort and common understanding. Here at China Dialogue we aim to promote that common understanding.

From the China Dialogue blog

Officials should have more power over Chinese companies abroad

Domestic environmental laws should be extended to overseas operations, says former government environment economist Hu Tao

Chinese overseas investments are rapidly increasing. As of 2011, China’s outward foreign direct investments (OFDI) spread across 132 countries and regions and topped US$60 billion annually, ranking ninth globally according to UN Conference on Trade and Development statistics. A significant amount of this increasing OFDI goes to the energy and resources sectors – much of it in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

But there are two sides to China’s OFDI coin. On the one side, these investments can benefit China and recipient countries, generating revenue and improving quality of life. However, like any country’s overseas investments, without the right policies and safeguards in place, these investments can fund projects that harm the environment and local communities.

WRI‘s new issue brief surveys the progress and challenges China faces in regulating the environmental and social impacts of its overseas investments. I sat down with WRI senior associate and China expert Hu Tao to talk about China’s overseas investment landscape. Before joining WRI, Tao worked as a senior environmental economist with China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP). Here’s what he had to say:

Denise Leung: How have China’s overseas investments grown in recent years? What are some trends you’re seeing?

Hu Tao: Although China’s outward foreign direct investments (OFDI) reached US$60 billion and only ranked ninth in the world in 2011, its growth rate has been much higher than other countries. As China’s GDP and foreign trade volume grow very quickly – jumping over the past decade from number six to number two and from number seven to number one, respectively – I am sure that China’s OFDI will catch up soon.

DL: What opportunities does this growing investment bring to China and to the countries in which it invests?

HT: These investments distribute economic resources worldwide and increase the efficiency of the global economy. They create profits for China’s investors and benefit host countries in ways such as job creation, infrastructure improvement and economic development. For example, Ethiopia, as one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, benefits in many ways, including economically and socially, by hosting China’s investments.

DL: But there are also social/environmental risks associated with these investments. Can you elaborate on how China’s OFDI creates these risks?

HT: Every investment project has its social and environmental externalities. Like other countries’ OFDI, China’s OFDI definitely has significant social and environmental impacts, especially in countries with poor social and environmental governance systems. As an investing country, China faces investment risks. For example, China has invested in several Nile River dam projects. These projects inevitably have implications – and potential risks – for the river ecosystem and the communities that rely on and live near the Nile.

Ideally, these risks should be fully evaluated and considered before an investment is made, and should be taken into account for the duration of the project. WRI is currently examining case studies that will illustrate the environmental and social risks posed and faced by Chinese companies.

DL: What are the biggest challenges that China faces in addressing the environmental and social effects of its overseas investments?

HT: In my view, there are three major challenges:

1) Poor governance systems in host countries, for example in some Least Developed Countries in Africa. Weak governance systems fail to protect communities and the environment from potential harm;

2) Some Chinese companies, especially some small- and medium-sized companies, who do not heed social and environmental responsibility within China, are now taking those negative practices abroad.

3) Lack of coherence between international investment/trade treaties and environmental agreements. From an international legal perspective, this is a grey area.

DL: China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) recently issued Guidelines on Environmental Protection and Cooperation, which apply to China’s overseas investments. What are the biggest opportunities and limitations of the guidelines?

HT: The current guidelines are voluntary. There are no mandatory guidelines. These are guidelines that companies may feel a moral obligation to follow, but do not face any repercussions for failing to do so.

When my former MEP colleagues and I were working on the guidelines – before I joined WRI – we tried very hard to make them mandatory. We wanted MEP to have the authority to manage the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and environmental standards of companies doing business overseas. After negotiating with MOFCOM, we had to make some compromises, so we started with voluntary guidelines first. In the future, we may have mandatory guidelines.

Even though the current guidelines are voluntary, they will have positive impacts on the large companies that pay attention to their public image, such as state-owned enterprises. Implementing the guidelines will be important for the corporate social responsibility of these companies.

In China, the current EIA Act only covers companies within the Chinese border. One possibility is to extend the EIA Act beyond the border to include companies doing business overseas. During the last National People’s Congress in March, we provided technical support for a bill submitted by one of the delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) that would authorise the National People’s Congress (NPC) to extend MEP’s oversight to Chinese companies overseas. The draft bill is still being considered, and relevant ministries from MEP and MOFCOM are being asked for feedback.

While we want mandatory guidelines in the future, we currently don’t have a legal basis to do this. We are now hoping NPC can authorise ministries to do more regarding the environmental management of Chinese companies overseas.

This post was first published by WRI Insights.

Locust plagues point to grim future of climate change

Climatic changes in China, the Middle East and Africa could see more severe outbreaks of locusts devastating food crops

The desert locust, the most notorious of about a dozen locust species for its ability to rapidly multiply and travel long distances, threatens an area of 32 million square kilometres, stretching across 50 countries from west Africa to India.

The fearsome insect has been farmers' foe since the earliest days of agriculture.

When solitary, locusts are harmless. But when they congregate into groups they transform – in behaviour and even appearance – into killer vegetarians. In turn, swarms can be as large as several hundred square kilometres, of which a single square kilometre can comprise at least 40 million bugs, at times even double that.

In the immature adult phase, a locust can consume its own weight – about two grams – in vegetation per day, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). One tonne of desert locusts ("a very small part of an average swarm", according to FAO's website) could guzzle in a single day an amount of food equivalent to that consumed by 2,500 people. Locust plagues could therefore seriously imperil crop production, and in turn food security.

An ongoing desert locust upsurge, primarily along the Red Sea periphery, possibly acts as a reminder to a natural threat that is often overlooked, or even deemed a thing of the past.

Swarms of locusts spread from North Africa

Countries today are considerably better equipped to deal with the threat than they used to be. The second half of the twentieth century has seen a dramatic decline in frequency, duration and intensity of desert locust plagues, largely thanks to improved control and monitoring capacities in the affected countries.

"What we have done as a big improvement is to be able to monitor where the locust are and try to control them," says Pietro Ceccato, an environmental remote sensing expert with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University. "Now we have that information – both from the control teams and from the satellite. We know where to target the control."

And yet, in anticipating future locust invasions, climate change appears to be one key unknown.

"This year is a bit unusual," says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at FAO. Normally, he explains, after a good breeding season like this year's, the locusts would move from Sudan to the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea. This autumn, however, while some did reach Saudi Arabia, groups started migrating northwards to the interior of Sudan and further to Egypt, not before Sudanese authorities treated close to 270 square kilometres.

By late February, an outbreak looked imminent, as groups and swarms of a new locust generation started moving north. In early March, Egyptian news outlets and social media were teeming with reports and photos of the clouds of locust that had descended on Cairo.

"It is relatively rare that Desert Locust swarms reach Cairo," the website of FAO's locust unit later reported. "This last occurred in November 2004, almost 50 years to the day after the previous occasion."

Within days, the swarms flying further east crossed the border into Israel, reaching the north west of the Negev desert. Three weeks later Jewish Israelis were celebrating Passover, commemorating the exodus of the Israelites from ancient Egypt, preceded by the Ten Plagues, the eight of which was the Plague of Locust.

According to FAO's Locust Watch, April has seen a total of 220 square kilometres treated across five countries, down from 790 square kilometres in March.

In Israel, the ministry of agriculture reported in mid-May that damages to crops were "minimal," but concerns are of the next waves of locust coming in from Egypt's Sinai peninsula as well as a new generation of the pest after extensive hatching has been detected.

"[Israeli] researchers had said that [the locusts] would not even be able to breed here due to weather conditions. And not only did they manage to breed, they have bred excellently and even settled. So, all projections were disproved," Dafna Yurista, the ministry's spokesperson told chinadialogue. According to FAO, the last time Israel saw locust breeding and formation of hopper bands was in April 1961.

Nevertheless, and despite the ongoing outbreak, control operations across the region appear to have been effective. "So far, there hasn't been any significant damage to crops," says FAO's Cressman.

In Locust Watch’s latest update, from May 15, three countries were put on the second highest level of alert – Saudi Arabia, Israel and Sudan – and control teams have been operating to curb the infestations before the young hoppers become voracious adults by the end of the month.

Adult locust groups forming in these countries are expected to move back to the summer breeding areas in central Sudan. In addition, some locusts now in Saudi Arabia, the Locust Watch update stated, "could reach southwest Iran and continue moving eastwards."

"So far," Cressman says, "Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia have been lucky. What we're concerned about now is this coming month in Sudan, where we have a new generation of locust, and those immature adults more likely to stay in those cropping areas and eat whatever is green – basically, the seasonal crops."

The last time the region had faced a large-scale locust upsurge was in 2003-2005. Back then, swarms took off from Niger and moved up to north Africa, before heading east along the Mediterranean coast. Overall, 26 countries were affected, and nearly 130,000 square kilometres were treated.

Back then, Morocco alone treated 40,000 square kilometres over a two-year period, escaping the plague without any substantial damage, says FAO's locust expert in the country Said Ghaout. This time, Morocco has seen a considerably smaller extent of infestation.

The impact of climate change

Yet both outbreaks have shown anomalous patterns, mostly owing to unusually favorable weather conditions at the locusts' breeding areas. Ghaout does not rule out the possibility that climate change played a role, or that these outbreaks might be a sign of things to come. "This is a question everybody is asking," he says.

"It's a real difficult topic," says Cressman about the possible effect of climate change on the desert locust. Generally, global meteorological models aren't sufficiently reliable to make concrete predictions for the desert locust habitat range, and regional models for the relevant desert areas are not developed enough, he says.

Overall, forecasts for desert locust activity rely on four main factors: temperature, rainfall, vegetation and wind. "I took a look at all the data that we have so far, and looked at temperature – because that's what everyone kind of agrees on, and we have the most data on – and it seems like if there's an increase of temperature under climate change scenarios, the effect on desert locust is very minimal," says Cressman. In this case, "they might be able to get an extra generation of breeding in before the habitat becomes unfavorable."

It's not all about temperature, however. To breed, desert locusts require moist soil and vegetation, so precipitation is key. But climate change models for the region contradict one another when it comes to rainfall, says Cressman.

For instance, in late April and early May, Saudi Arabia saw more rainfall than usual, which could in turn contribute to locusts moving further into the interior of the Arabian peninsula. "It happens that sometimes you have more rain, sometimes you have less rain," says IRI's Ceccato, who monitors climatic and ecological conditions that affect desert locust activity. "But that happens. It's variability. To relate that to climate change, it's difficult."

China’s locust plagues

Several studies have tried to explore the possible impact of climate change on the abundance of another species, the Oriental migratory locust, in China. In 2011, researchers examined locust outbreaks recorded over a period of 1,910 years and meteorological data over the same time-span and concluded, that "there were more locusts under dry and cold conditions and when abundance was high in the preceding year or decade." Therefore, an increase in temperature or rainfall would actually mean fewer locust outbreaks.

A paper published four years earlier, based on a thousand years of records, has also suggested that warming could mean fewer locust plagues in China, since locust numbers were historically "highest during cold and wet periods".

Yet, a 2009 study using the same data came to different conclusions. Climate change, these authors said, could worsen locust outbreaks in China. Taking a more geographically nuanced approach, the researchers showed that, in north China, the most severe locust upsurges happened in warm and dry years. In south China, however, it was during warm and wet years.

Despite their contradictions, taken together these studies and others do offer some valuable insights, and not only for China. First, scientists seem to agree that rainfall could be affecting locust dynamics more than temperature. There also appears to be a consensus that climate change predictions for rainfall patterns are so far unsatisfactory.

And this is not the only missing variable. "The other aspect that nobody is really looking at yet is what's going to happen to the wind under climate change," Cressman says, "because of course locusts migrate with the wind."

Even if projections are still inconclusive, history tells us that locusts have braved previous climatic changes, and humans need to prepare.

"Probably all countries need to review their preparedness in terms of some of these climate change scenarios, and maybe look at the worst case scenario," says FAO's Cressman. In particular, that means preparing for longer locust seasons, he explains. "They're going to have to make those plans a little more flexible."

Why the world struggles to prevent climate chaos

Fear of the distant horrors of climate change isn't enough to drive anything more than just political talk and hand-wringing

Earlier this month, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was reported to have passed 400 parts per million for the first time in 4.5 million years. It is also continuing to rise at a rate of about 2 parts per million every year. On the present course, it could be 800 parts per million by the end of the century. Thus, all the discussions of mitigating the risks of catastrophic climate change have turned out to be empty words.

Collectively, humanity has yawned and decided to let the dangers mount. Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College in London, notes that when the concentrations were last this high, “the world was warmer on average by three or four degrees Celsius than it is today. There was no permanent ice sheet on Greenland, sea levels were much higher, and the world was a very different place, although not all of these differences may be directly related to CO2 levels.”

Read also: The psychology of climate change: why we do nothing

His caveat is proper. Nonetheless, the greenhouse effect is basic science: it is why the earth has a more pleasant climate than the moon. CO2 is a known greenhouse gas. There are positive feedback effects from rising temperatures, via, for example, the quantity of water vapour in the atmosphere. In brief, humanity is conducting a huge, uncontrolled and almost certainly irreversible climate experiment with the only home it is likely to have. Moreover, if one judges by the basic science and the opinions of the vast majority of qualified scientists, risk of calamitous change is large.

What makes the inaction more remarkable is that we have been hearing so much hysteria about the dire consequences of piling up a big burden of public debt on our children and grandchildren. But all that is being bequeathed is financial claims of some people on other people. If the worst comes to the worst, a default will occur. Some people will be unhappy. But life will go on. Bequeathing a planet in climatic chaos is a rather bigger concern. There is nowhere else for people to go and no way to reset the planet’s climate system. If we are to take a prudential view of public finances, we should surely take a prudential view of something irreversible and much costlier.

So why are we behaving like this?

The first and deepest reason is that, as the civilisation of ancient Rome was built on slaves, ours is built on fossil fuels. What happened in the beginning of the 19th century was not an “industrial revolution” but an “energy revolution”. Putting carbon into the atmosphere is what we do.

As I have argued in Climate Policy, what used to be the energy-intensive lifestyle of today’s high-income countries has gone global. Economic convergence between emerging and high-income countries is increasing demand for energy faster than improved energy efficiency is reducing it. Not only aggregate CO2 emissions but even emissions per head are rising. The latter is partly driven by China’s reliance on coal-powered electricity generation.

A second reason is opposition to any interventions in the free market. Some of this, no doubt, is driven by narrowly economic interests. But do not underestimate the power of ideas. To admit that a free economy generates a vast global external cost is to admit that the large-scale government regulation so often proposed by hated environmentalists is justified. For many libertarians or classical liberals, the very idea is unsupportable. It is far easier to deny the relevance of the science.

A symptom of this is clutching at straws. It is noted, for example, that average global temperatures have not risen recently, though they are far higher than a century ago. Yet periods of falling temperature within a rising trend have occurred before.

A third reason may be the pressure of responding to immediate crises that has consumed almost all the attention of policymakers in the high-income countries since 2007.

A fourth is a touching confidence that, should the worst come to the worst, human ingenuity will find some clever ways of managing the worst results of climate change.

A fifth is the complexity of reaching effective and enforceable global agreements on the control of emissions among so many countries. Not surprisingly, the actual agreements reached give more an appearance of action than a reality.

A sixth is indifference to the interests of people to be born in a relatively distant future. As the old line goes: “Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?”

A final (and related) reason is the need to strike a just balance between poor countries and rich ones and between those who emitted most of the greenhouse gases in the past and those who will emit in the future.

The more one thinks about the challenge, the more impossible it is to envisage effective action. We will, instead, watch the rise in global concentrations of greenhouse gases. If it turns out to lead to a disaster, it will by then be far too late to do anything much about it.

So what might shift such a course? My view is, increasingly, that there is no point in making moral demands. People will not do something on this scale because they care about others, even including their own more remote descendants. They mostly care rather too much about themselves for that.

Most people believe today that a low-carbon economy would be one of universal privation. They will never accept such a situation. This is true both of the people of high-income countries, who want to retain what they have, and the people of the rest of the world, who want to enjoy what the people of high-income countries now have.

A necessary, albeit not sufficient condition, then, is a politically sellable vision of a prosperous low-carbon economy. That is not what people now see. Substantial resources must be invested in the technologies that would credibly deliver such a future.

Yet that is not all. If such an opportunity does appear more credible, institutions must also be developed that can deliver it.

Neither the technological nor the institutional conditions exist at present. In their absence, there is no political will to do anything real about the process driving our experiment with the climate. Yes, there is talk and wringing of hands. But there is, predictably, no effective action. If that is to change, we must start by offering humanity a far better future. Fear of distant horror is not enough.